In defence of human dignity

The one that concerned me most was not sexual or behavioural. I said the whole argument about gay marriage was taking place on unsound intellectual foundations because marriage as a legal institution is not about love or about sex. It is, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “a friendship recognized by the police,” and unless you know why, you can’t say anything coherent about it. So I ended that column with a line from C.S. Lewis: “Beware: Those who call for nonsense will find that it comes.” And it has.

Stern admits that his “moral intuition is that incest is a grotesquerie and should be illegal even if participants are consenting adults”. But having said “If you are repulsed by sex between two men or women, that’s your problem … the state has no business pronouncing on what consenting adults do in their bedrooms,” he suggests that his revulsion at incest is his problem.

It’s not. His problem is that he denies the possibility of moral reasoning. As McGill university ethicist Margaret Somerville just wrote in the Globe and Mail, “Those making the case for legalization reject the idea that incestuous conduct might be inherently morally wrong. Rather, moral relativism governs … Ethics becomes nothing more than personal preferences.”

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